Careful tuning of a regularization parameter is indispensable in many machine learning tasks because it has a significant impact on generalization performances. Nevertheless, current practice of regularization parameter tuning is more of an art than a science, e.g., it is hard to tell how many grid-points would be needed in cross-validation (CV) for obtaining a solution with sufficiently small CV error. In this paper we propose a novel framework for computing a lower bound of the CV errors as a function of the regularization parameter, which we call regularization path of CV error lower bounds. The proposed framework can be used for providing a theoretical approximation guarantee on a set of solutions in the sense that how far the CV error of the current best solution could be away from best possible CV error in the entire range of the regularization parameters. We demonstrate through numerical experiments that a theoretically guaranteed a choice of regularization parameter in the above sense is possible with reasonable computational costs.

We present a layered Boltzmann machine (BM) that can better exploit the advantages of a distributed representation. It is widely believed that deep BMs (DBMs) have far greater representational power than its shallow counterpart, restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs). However, this expectation on the supremacy of DBMs over RBMs has not ever been validated in a theoretical fashion. In this paper, we provide both theoretical and empirical evidences that the representational power of DBMs can be actually rather limited in taking advantages of distributed representations. We propose an approximate measure for the representational power of a BM regarding to the efficiency of a distributed representation. With this measure, we show a surprising fact that DBMs can make inefficient use of distributed representations. Based on these observations, we propose an alternative BM architecture, which we dub soft-deep BMs (sDBMs). We show that sDBMs can more efficiently exploit the distributed representations in terms of the measure. Experiments demonstrate that sDBMs outperform several state-of-the-art models, including DBMs, in generative tasks on binarized MNIST and Caltech-101 silhouettes.

Recent progress on automatic generation of image captions has shown that it is possible to describe the most salient information conveyed by images with accurate and meaningful sentences. In this paper, we propose an image caption system that exploits the parallel structures between images and sentences. In our model, the process of generating the next word, given the previously generated ones, is aligned with the visual perception experience where the attention shifting among the visual regions imposes a thread of visual ordering. This alignment characterizes the flow of "abstract meaning", encoding what is semantically shared by both the visual scene and the text description. Our system also makes another novel modeling contribution by introducing scene-specific contexts that capture higher-level semantic information encoded in an image. The contexts adapt language models for word generation to specific scene types. We benchmark our system and contrast to published results on several popular datasets. We show that using either region-based attention or scene-specific contexts improves systems without those components. Furthermore, combining these two modeling ingredients attains the state-of-the-art performance.

Statistical models with constrained probability distributions are abundant in machine learning. Some examples include regression models with norm constraints (e.g., Lasso), probit, many copula models, and latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). Bayesian inference involving probability distributions confined to constrained domains could be quite challenging for commonly used sampling algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel augmentation technique that handles a wide range of constraints by mapping the constrained domain to a sphere in the augmented space. By moving freely on the surface of this sphere, sampling algorithms handle constraints implicitly and generate proposals that remain within boundaries when mapped back to the original space. Our proposed method, called {Spherical Augmentation}, provides a mathematically natural and computationally efficient framework for sampling from constrained probability distributions. We show the advantages of our method over state-of-the-art sampling algorithms, such as exact Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, using several examples including truncated Gaussian distributions, Bayesian Lasso, Bayesian bridge regression, reconstruction of quantized stationary Gaussian process, and LDA for topic modeling.

We are concerned with obtaining novel concentration inequalities for the missing mass, i.e. the total probability mass of the outcomes not observed in the sample. We not only derive - for the first time - distribution-free Bernstein-like deviation bounds with sublinear exponents in deviation size for missing mass, but also improve the results of McAllester and Ortiz (2003) andBerend and Kontorovich (2013, 2012) for small deviations which is the most interesting case in learning theory. It is known that the majority of standard inequalities cannot be directly used to analyze heterogeneous sums i.e. sums whose terms have large difference in magnitude. Our generic and intuitive approach shows that the heterogeneity issue introduced in McAllester and Ortiz (2003) is resolvable at least in the case of missing mass via regulating the terms using our novel thresholding technique.

We introduce the Variational Holder (VH) bound as an alternative to Variational Bayes (VB) for approximate Bayesian inference. Unlike VB which typically involves maximization of a non-convex lower bound with respect to the variational parameters, the VH bound involves minimization of a convex upper bound to the intractable integral with respect to the variational parameters. Minimization of the VH bound is a convex optimization problem; hence the VH method can be applied using off-the-shelf convex optimization algorithms and the approximation error of the VH bound can also be analyzed using tools from convex optimization literature. We present experiments on the task of integrating a truncated multivariate Gaussian distribution and compare our method to VB, EP and a state-of-the-art numerical integration method for this problem.

This work aims at recovering signals that are sparse on graphs. Compressed sensing offers techniques for signal recovery from a few linear measurements and graph Fourier analysis provides a signal representation on graph. In this paper, we leverage these two frameworks to introduce a new Lasso recovery algorithm on graphs. More precisely, we present a non-convex, non-smooth algorithm that outperforms the standard convex Lasso technique. We carry out numerical experiments on three benchmark graph datasets.

We present a simple, general technique for reducing the sample complexity of matrix and tensor decomposition algorithms applied to distributions. We use the technique to give a polynomial-time algorithm for standard ICA with sample complexity nearly linear in the dimension, thereby improving substantially on previous bounds. The analysis is based on properties of random polynomials, namely the spacings of an ensemble of polynomials. Our technique also applies to other applications of tensor decompositions, including spherical Gaussian mixture models.

Previously, we proposed a physically inspired rule to organize the data points in a sparse yet effective structure, called the in-tree (IT) graph, which is able to capture a wide class of underlying cluster structures in the datasets, especially for the density-based datasets. Although there are some redundant edges or lines between clusters requiring to be removed by computer, this IT graph has a big advantage compared with the k-nearest-neighborhood (k-NN) or the minimal spanning tree (MST) graph, in that the redundant edges in the IT graph are much more distinguishable and thus can be easily determined by several methods previously proposed by us. In this paper, we propose a general framework to re-construct the IT graph, based on an initial neighborhood graph, such as the k-NN or MST, etc, and the corresponding graph distances. For this general framework, our previous way of constructing the IT graph turns out to be a special case of it. This general framework 1) can make the IT graph capture a wider class of underlying cluster structures in the datasets, especially for the manifolds, and 2) should be more effective to cluster the sparse or graph-based datasets.

We consider the problem of learning regression functions from pairwise data when there exists prior knowledge that the relation to be learned is symmetric or anti-symmetric. Such prior knowledge is commonly enforced by symmetrizing or anti-symmetrizing pairwise kernel functions. Through spectral analysis, we show that these transformations reduce the kernel's effective dimension. Further, we provide an analysis of the approximation properties of the resulting kernels, and bound the regularization bias of the kernels in terms of the corresponding bias of the original kernel.